UN Warns of Demographic Collapse

By | January 20, 2023

NEW YORK, January 20 (C-Fam) The United Nations raised the alarm about “inevitable and irreversible” aging and low-fertility in every country in a report released earlier this month.

“Ageing societies may face fiscal challenges due to rising health-care, long-term care, retirement and other old-age support costs, combined with a potential reduction in government revenue from fewer working-age taxpayers,” the new report warns, explaining how all countries with few exceptions are experiencing low-fertility and aging. To face this unprecedented ongoing crisis, the report recommends increasing expenditures for “healthy aging” and a universal basic income for the elderly.

The 161 page World Social Report of 2023, “Leaving No One Behind in an Aging World” is the highest profile and the most comprehensive UN report yet about the challenges that low fertility and aging pose to mankind.

The report speculates that new entitlements for the elderly may be funded by increasing the participation of women and the elderly in the workforce, more immigration, and family-oriented policies to increase the birth-rate, including parental leave and baby bonuses.

The report suggests sustained family-oriented policies to help fertility rebound following the example of wealthy European nations but conspicuously leaves out any calls for increased access to family planning or any mentions of reproductive health and rights. Past UN reports on low fertility have always sought to balance the focus on low fertility and aging with continued support for fertility-reduction policies and reproductive rights.

More and more popular cultural figures are raising awareness of the dangers of low fertility and aging. The billionaire and social media magnate Elon Musk has long warned that population decline is the biggest threat to humanity and the global economy.

In 2022 he tweeted, “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”

The popular podcast host, Joe Rogan, recently interviewed Peter Zeihan, a global security expert and social media personality, whose made dramatic predictions about Russia and China, as examples of what can happen to countries who never grow rich before their population began to decline.

Zeihan believes China’s economy and society will collapse in this decade.

“This decade was always going to be the decade where most of the world moves into mass retirement and the economic model collapses. The next decade was always going to be when it happens to the developing world. And we have found recently that the Chinese have jumped the ship, and this is their last decade too,” he told Rogan on his popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, earlier this month.

Zeihan also predicted that “the Russian state will be turning the lights off sometime between 2050 and 2070 anyway.” The Ukraine war was just an attempt to “die on their own terms,” he said.

This week, the New York Times also published a report about China’s collapsing population.

For over 20 years, the UN population division, which produces demographic reports used by governments, academia, and the private sector, has warned that low-fertility and aging may be dangerous. Past consultations of the UN population division have also warned that immigration and pro-natalist policies in wealthy countries may delay the consequences of the demographic winter, but ultimately will not work. The direst effects of the global demographic winter will be experienced by poor countries, according to the UN population division.

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